I'm Latigo Flint, the greatest quickdraw the world has ever known. I can draw, aim and fire a six-gun faster and straighter than anyone, living or dead. If I had been born 150 years earlier, I'd have been a living god in the American West - but I wasn't, and that's the dern, cursed luck that I have to live with.
Blogger.com has agreed to publish a running journal of my life. I reckon that was mighty kind of them, and I'm much obliged.

Wednesday, May 03, 2006

True Western Truth #143

To be a real man in the Squinty-Eyed West, you often had to go places your horse didn't want to go--like into a storm, or off a cliff, or down a canyon where wolves were. Sometimes you could trick your horse by telling him the wolves were friendly. But more often than not, he couldn't be fooled and you needed to beat him cruelly--and/or stab him in the side a bunch of times with loops of jagged metal. To this day, horses tend to giggle like fiends when their riders are killed by wolves.

Once I tamed a canyon-dwelling wolf... I found him two miles off the turnpike, caught in a wayward clothes basket and more frightened than hurt. I took him in and fed him apple pie. He showed me the tastiest bits of the canyon-dwelling hare, and where to rub my back in the dirt. I taught him sums and he taught me freedom. One day I woke up and the warmth of him in the bed beside me was gone, and it was only then I remembered I had left the door open, and it was the time of year when the lady wolves sing the song that no young canyon-dwelling hewolf can resist.

No doubt Trevor. Just talking to you now--you know, I battle this constant urge to snarl blood, and post nothing but Canebrake Divinity stories for the next two years or so.

Sweet, sweet Paula--canyon wolves can't ever be tamed! At best they can only be coaxed to not maim.(Typically with apple pie, sometimes with pomegranate halves.)I like to tell people I'm a canyon-dwelling hewolf, but the truth is I hate apple pie.

(And yours there was a beautiful True Southern Truth, darn good if I do say.)